They are strangers in a strange place. Surrounded by foreign flora and fauna, the newcomers are bewildered by people with odd habits.

Floridians wear bright colors in February, which is tweed season back home. They watch blustery NFL games on their patios. They wear short-sleeve shirts on Christmas Day. They eat grouper, barbecue and even alligator, but no clam chowder. They go to the beach, not the shore.

It's a strange place, this Florida. So the newcomers band together with others from their homeland. Together they will adjust to the new world. Together, they will conquer Florida.

And what better way to start than by rooting for the home team? At a sports bar, huddled under the banner of their college team or their home state's NFL team, transplants reminisce about such faraway places as Michigan, Iowa and Indiana. There, they find what they want more than anything else: to meet somebody, anybody, from home.

At one Apopka sports bar, Ohio State alumni gather on Saturdays to watch their teams on a big-screen TV. On Sundays, the same bar is home to the roaming pack of dogs known as Cleveland Browns fans.

At an Altamonte Springs bar, University of Georgia fans regularly share the place with alumni groups from Louisiana State University and the University of Tennessee. Everywhere you turn, it seems, another sports bar has become the home of yet another alumni association.

''Florida is a state of transplants,'' said Marianne Cantu, a preschool teacher and Louisiana native who moved to Florida 18 years ago. ''When I came here, there was nothing. No clubs, no place where you could go for a little Louisiana culture. And you miss that. All the gumbo, the crawfish boils, the dances and the music.''

But as Orlando boomed during the 1980s, so did the number of clubs organized to give newcomers a sense of community. Most, like the 10-year-old LSU group, are alumni associations that follow the school's athletic teams. And in the South, that means football.

''But now that LSU's football team is in the cellar,'' Cantu said, ''we focus on having fun. We just want to - as they say in Louisiana - pass a good time.''

Occasionally the natives may get homesick, but Cantu has discovered that few of the LSU club's 150 members want to return to Louisiana.

''We all love Florida,'' she said, ''but there's this special part of us that belongs in Louisiana. It's not so much that we want to go back home. We just don't want to break those ties.''

Like the LSU group, the Iowa Club, Central Florida's answer for homesick Hawkeyes, got its start as a fan club. Followers of the University of Iowa's teams gathered at sports bars to catch the Hawkeyes when they played on television. The average football game might bring 35 or 40 fans, but the number swells to 150 for the annual Iowa-Iowa State game, an event that draws former Iowans from Jacksonville and Tampa. But some members, like Mari Jo David, joined not for the sports but for the people.

''I go because the people are from Iowa,'' David said. ''That's the most important thing.''

David, a second-grade teacher, has lived in Florida for 13 years. Last year, after she and her husband divorced, David joined the Iowa Club. She wanted to meet some new friends. Specifically, she wanted to meet people from home.

''When you go through something like that, you have to have people to help pull you up. And these people helped.''

Her fellow Iowans were friendly and welcoming. They arranged dates for her, suggested meetings or invited her out when she had no plans. When the group was planning to drive to a football game in Miami, half a dozen club members called to make sure David had a ride.

''There's a freedom when you meet new people in this group. They're very trusting. Usually, when you meet new people, they're very skeptical of you. They check you out. They want to see what kind of car you drive, what degrees you hold,'' David said.

''Not Iowa people. They're open and friendly, even if they don't know anything about you. Just that you're from Iowa too,'' David said. ''That's a very warm, nice feeling - and that's very hard to find these days.''

Finding friends in a small group helps to put a face on Orlando, which can strike newcomers as an anonymous city - all strangers and no personality.

''I'm from Knoxville, Tenn.; my wife's from Knoxville,'' said Mike McGovern, a University of Tennessee alumnus who moved to Orlando eight years ago. ''We could go home today and walk through the mall and see 25 people in that mall we know. There, you couldn't go a day without seeing people you grew up with. I don't think you could do that in Orlando.''

What's missing, said the 36-year-old McGovern, is a sense of community. People move here, he said, and continue to identify with their former hometowns because there has been little here for them to identify with.

''Right now, you see everybody running around carrying these other flags. If you go to Knoxville, everybody's got Volunteers bumper stickers. If you go to Georgia, everybody's got Bulldogs bumper stickers. You come here and it's a hodgepodge. Everybody's got everything.

''Ideally, I think what we'd really like to see, instead of all these people clinging to their past places, is everyone cheering for the same team. Maybe someday we'll all be driving around with bumper stickers for the Orlando Magic or the Orlando Sun Rays.